HL7 New Zealand

David Hay, HL7NZ Chairman Awarded this week

The winners of the Excellence in IT Awards 2016 were handed out in front of nearly 700 people at a gala event in Wellington on 12 July 2016. The eight Awards celebrate the individuals and teams that make up the industry and are a collaboration of 11 of New Zealand’s leading tech associations, to create a sector-wide awards programme. Partners include the Institute of IT Professionals, CITRENZ, TUANZ, Health Informatics NZ, itSMF NZ, NZ Software Association, GOVIS, Project Management Institute, InternetNZ, NZRise and the NZ Open Source Society.

The Excellence in Health Informatics was awarded to our own Chairman

Dr David Hay – for demonstrating a breadth of understanding of the Heath sector and has dedicated his entire career to bridging the role of clinician (he is a GP by training) with technology, with stunning results.  Congratulations David.

HL7 Australia 2016 Plenary Working Group Meeting

6 JULY 2016 – 8 JULY 2016 Rydges Sydney Central, 28 Albion Street, Sydney NSW

Be part of history with the first 3 day HL7 Australia Working Group Meeting in Sydney 6, 7 & 8 July 2016, at Rydges Central.  Attendees can get excellent room rates at the hotel – just mention you are attending the HL7 Australia Working Group Meeting!
Set to be a key event in the Australia Health Informatics community, the WGM brings together clinicians, software vendors, medical organisations and key government decision makers.  The three day event provides opportunity to collaborate on draft e-health standards, network and share ideas with others within the community and attend a range of educational sessions. 
(For more details http://www.hl7.org.au/events/hl7-australia-2016-plenary-working-group-meeting/)

DICOM Workshop in Sydney on 11-12 August 2016

For HL7 NZ Members interested in DICOM, a DICOM trainer Marco Kemper is offering a 2-day Workshop in Sydney on 11-12 August 2016 with CPD credits allocated by New Zealand Institute of Medical Radiation Technology. The registration period is until 10 June 2016.

For more details, please visit Marco’s website: http://dicom.workshopfor.me

Clinical Genomics on FHIR – Innovative Healthcare

From an Akana Blog article by Laura Heritage on 10 February 2016:
“Gil Alterovitz from Harvard Medical School and the SMART on FHIR Genomics team have created a set of genetic specific profiles on top of the FHIR resources; Observation, Diagnostic Report, Diagnostic Order, FamilyMemberHistory, and Sequence. This allows applications that understand FHIR and the Genetics profiles, like the SMART Genomics apps to simply point to any FHIR servers that also implement the FHIR Genetics profiles to query and retrieve the data they need to embed it in EMRs and other applications.  Below is an illustration of how these FHIR resources are related when used in conjunction with the Genetic Profiles.”
https://blog.akana.com/clinical-genomics-on-fhir-innovative-healthcare/

Festive Season’s Greetings from the Chairman

As the year draws to an end it is customary to reflect back on what was achieved during the year, and what the New Year may bring. From the perspective of healthcare standards (particularly HL7) this has been a great year! Internationally we have seen the new interoperability standard – FHIR – going from strength to strength with pretty much every country on the planet doing something with it, from real production deployments to pilots. We’ve also seen increasing co-operation between HL7 and other Standards Development Organizations such as IHTSDO (SNOMED), openEHR and CIMI in our objective to improve the delivery of care to the patient.

Locally, we’ve held a couple of well attended seminars – including one that was aimed at clinicians rather than implementers as we grappled with how to represent Adverse Drug Reactions in FHIR. I’m personally keen to get Clinicians and Business Analysts – and the educated Consumer – more involved. FHIR makes it easier than it has ever been to involve ‘non technical’ people in this important work, and it certainly helps that HISO and the National IT Board endorsed FHIR as an endorsed interoperability standard for new Zealand.

But it’s looking forward to next year that is the most exciting, as we seem to have a real convergence from different parts of the sector on interoperability. A perfect storm of activity.

From the national IT Board we had the announcement at HINZ of the ‘National EHR’ – a ‘longitudinal health record’ holding common data about people and supporting common functionality that is critical for the safe and effective delivery of healthcare. This will provide FHIR based API’s that application vendors can use for innovative applications using a common set of patient data and easy to use APIs. HISO is fully engaged in this process – expect to see some announcement of workshops and events soon! (and a very aggressive timeline…)

And from the vendor community we had the announcement that some of the larger and more forward looking vendors in New Zealand are intending to collaborate to deliver ‘precision medicine’ – an underpinning of which is the collection of structured, coded data that can serve as the basis of the analytics required to support this. It is hoped – and intended – that all vendors in New Zealand become engaged in this. Our very own ‘project Argonaut’.So enjoy the Christmas break, have a happy New Year and get ready for the adventure!
Dr David HayHL7NZ Chairman

2016 Board Elected

Congratulating the following Office Bearers and Board members – read more

• David Hay (Chairman)
• Peter Jordan (Vice Chairman)
• Peter Sergent (Treasurer)
• Jane Farris (Secretary)
• Dave Fallas
• Edwin Ng
• Ray Murakami
• Martin Entwistle
• Chris Peck
• Koray Atalag
• Alastair Kenworthy

HL7NZ Annual General Meeting 2015

Was held on Friday 20th November 2015.  Minutes as attachment below.  We welcome the incoming Board and Office Bearers for 2016.

“Light up the sky with Epic FHIRworks”…